Chapter 2: The Days That Followed

Chapter 2: The Days That Followed

In the weeks after the fire, everything moved slowly and yet all at once. William was still in shock. So were we. The news had said it clearly — a fire in Bray, a man dead, the home left in ruins. But it didn’t feel real until Josephine arrived at my door with tears in her eyes and an overnight bag that looked too heavy for what little it carried.

We fell into a kind of rhythm after that. She traveled to Bray on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to be with William. The rest of the time, she stayed with me in Dublin — Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends. It wasn’t a plan so much as a survival strategy. Her loyalty to William was unwavering, but the grief in Bray hung heavy. She needed the escape, and I became her escape route.

I’d wait at the bus stop on those nights, watching for her silhouette to appear under the streetlight. Sometimes she arrived silent, other times she poured out stories about William — how he was coping, or not. She spoke of the awkward silences between them, the weight of shared memories, and the strange feeling of returning to a home that no longer existed.

William was homeless, technically, though no one dared use that word. He slept in spare rooms and temporary spaces while waiting for repairs to his house. But the real wreckage was inside him. Josephine said his eyes had changed. He spoke little and trusted even less. She stayed anyway, even when he pushed her away. She cooked for him when she could, and sometimes just sat beside him while he stared into the void.

I admired her. She didn’t flinch at sadness. She carried it like a familiar suitcase — not with ease, but with acceptance.

Those nights in my flat, we rarely spoke about the fire directly. Instead, we made tea and watched the same old DVDs until the disc menu burned into the screen. She’d fall asleep on the couch and I’d throw a blanket over her. We never called it caregiving. It was just friendship — stretched thin, but still intact.

Sometimes I wondered how long it could last, this delicate balancing act between two towns, two broken boys, and one girl trying to hold the pieces together. But for that winter, it worked. She gave him Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She gave me everything else.

And in between all the traveling, all the heartbreak and routine, something shifted between us too. Not romance — something quieter, more permanent. A kind of unspoken trust. The kind you earn in the shadows of someone else’s tragedy.

That was our life then: tea, buses, grief, and flickers of light in the dark. We were only holding on. But sometimes, holding on was enough.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

After the Fire: Friendship, Loss, and What Remains

Chapter 1: New Court Days Before the fire, before the grief, and long before the quiet silences that would stretch between us, there was New Court School in Bray. That was where Josephine and William first met — two kids walking the same halls, sitting through the same lessons, learning side by side. It wasn’t a school people talked about much outside the town, but inside those walls, friendships were built the way all meaningful ones are: slowly, through time and little things. Josephine stood out not because she talked much — quite the opposite. She was gentle, observant, and spoke in careful doses, like someone rationing her energy for when it was needed most. William was louder, more impulsive, full of stories and laughter. They made an odd pair to outsiders, but it worked. Maybe that was the beginning of everything that followed — the way they balanced each other. I wasn’t there with them in New Court. My connection came later, but I always felt like I was catching up to something...
Read more

Chapter 7: A New Jersey

After William got his keys, the silence between the three of us settled into something permanent. Josephine still came to my place, but it was different now. She was quieter. Tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix. She stopped mentioning Bray altogether. I didn’t ask. Some things didn’t need to be spoken aloud. For a long while, we drifted. Just the two of us now. The energy we once gave to William — the shared routines, the urgency — it had nowhere to go. That was when I noticed her looking for something else. A leaflet. A poster. A bus ad. Special Olympics. She’d seen it before, of course. Knew people involved. But never joined. Not after school. Not even when invited. “Maybe I should,” she said one day. Quietly. I didn’t push her. Just nodded. She didn’t sign up that year. Or the next. But the thought had been planted. What I didn’t know then — what none of us could have — was how much it would come to mean to her. How it would give her structure again. Purpose. A place to belong. But...
Read more

Chapter 3: The Days In Between

In the quiet that followed the fire, there was no dramatic turning point — just the slow, grinding passage of days that felt longer than they should have. William remained without a home, adrift in the ruins of a life that once held the simple comfort of his father’s voice in the kitchen. The repairs to the house in Bray were promised, postponed, then promised again. Each delay tested the limits of patience, of hope. Josephine moved between two worlds in those days. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were for Bray — for William. She made the journey like clockwork, arriving with a quiet steadiness that kept his world from collapsing entirely. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends, she returned to Dublin, where I tried to offer her a little warmth, a bit of normality, and a place to simply be. We never called it a schedule, but it became one. A rhythm of resilience. There were no grand gestures, no headlines after the first one. Just the same cup of tea passed across a kitchen table. The s...
Read more